First, what are the forces at which the helmets in question were tested at when they failed the impact tests?

Second, what are the forces that are frequently experienced by an equestrian falling off of their horse?

gravity can be a real bitch

I couldn’t find any answers to the first question, which is an important one to me. If the authors were testing helmets at 10,000 gs (G-forces) and they fail to protect the head against two impacts at that force well… that’s unrealistic. But if the authors were testing helmets at 350 gs (a force easily acquired by an object falling from 3.5 meters with a stopping distance of only 1 cm), then that’s a much more reasonable test. Fear not, I’ve emailed the main author of the study to get a little more information about how they conducted their research. I’ll update you when I find out. (I did discover that they use a really funny machine to test these things!)

To the second question, the answer is: it turns out it depends. The basic calculation of g-forces involves the rate of deceleration and the force of gravity. Rate of deceleration can be calculated by using velocity and stopping distance. And therein lies the rub: stopping distance is highly variable on difference surfaces. For example, when you drop your phone on asphalt, the stopping distance is basically just the crunch factor of your phone — as little as 1-2 mm in some cases.

The other complication is that there are multiple force vectors at work when you fall off a horse. Not only do you fall from some height to the ground, but you also stop your forward motion — motion that can vary from 300 mpm (slow canter) to 600 mpm (Rolex gallop) depending on the speed you’re moving.

lets not forget all the physics lessons Murray has given me

I took physics (twice), though, and was pretty confident that I could figure out the force vectors, so set about determining the g forces likely experienced by helmets and riders falling at different speeds. G forces are a convenient unit to calculate this in, since they are the same no matter the mass of the falling object — and that’s the unit in which the “brain trauma” numbers were reported.

There are a couple of other caveats here. Because I was using physics equations, they aren’t taking into account any of those pesky real-life forces like friction (ground or air), the oddity of the human/horse shape, what part of the body hits the ground first, etc. etc. We are also not taking into account the fact that different parts of the body are likely to encounter different amounts of force by landing at different times. Just assume that the hypothetical human in these equations always lands directly on their head. So we’re working with a frictionless, lawn-darting, spherical humanoid riding in a vacuum. You know. A really realistic one.

Also, I could be wrong. There aren’t any internet resources that confirmed my plan to add these forces using the Pythagorean theorem. I bulled ahead regardless.

Also, force vectors for helmet calculation will be pointing in toward the object. Because what we are interested in is the force the surface is exerting on the object (one’s head, for example) during the stop*, so the force vectors should be reversed from the above image. It doesn’t affect the calculations.

*You know that old joke about cliff jumping. It’s not the long drop that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.

With that information, let’s answer a few of my burning questions about forces and riding!

We’ll start with an easy one. If you drop the helmet on the ground, are you really voiding the protective abilities of your helmet?

Let’s say you’re about my height (1.5 meters), and drop your helmet from your hands (about 1 meter high) on to arena sand, which compresses about 2cm when the helmet hits the ground.

100 cm / 2 cm = 50 gs of force

If the stopping distance decreases to 0.5 cm (5 mm)

100 cm / 0.5 cm = 200 gs of force

I don’t actually know how much force the outside of a helmet can withstand. But 200 gs is well below what a helmet is supposed to protect you against (300 gs), and likely below what the helmets are tested at. I’m not going to make any declarations about the safety of a helmet after being dropped on anything but arena sand — which I don’t think is the end of the world. (When some butterfingers drops her helmet repeatedly on the barn aisle though….)

More pertinent to humans, if someone falls off of a horse onto arena sand, what are the forces experienced by their helmet? And by their head?

First, what height are they falling from? Let’s say we have a 16.2 hand horse, and the human’s head is 2.5 feet above that height — like a medium-height person sitting on a relatively tall horse. That’s 241.2 centimeters high. Let’s stick with that 2cm stopping distance again. Without any horizontal motion (i.e. horse is standing still and our spherical rider just falls off the side):

241.2 cm / 2 cm = 120.6 gs of force — a not insubstantial amount of force, but not enough to for sure cause a serious brain injury

If the helmet foam compresses by 2mm during the impact, then the head in question experiences a slightly different amount of force

What if you fall off at the peak of a fence? My head was about 292 cm in the air at the peak of that charming 2’6″ fence above (I used a really specific measuring system called PowerPoint), so if we go with our previously calculated stopping distances

292 cm / 2 cm = 146 gs
292 cm / 4 cm = 73 gs

Okay, let’s talk horses in motion.

In stadium, posted speeds vary between 300 and 400 mpm — I think? I’ve never really paid attention except when writing up programs — which is well within the range of a canter. Let’s say that rider and pony have an unfortunate parting of ways at 350 mpm involving a dirty stop, and our lawn-darting, spherical rider goes flying over pony’s head and on to the ground, where she skids for 30 cm (1 foot) in arena sand that compresses to 4 cm (a little more cushy than the aforementioned arena sand).

All in all, it seems like falling in soft, squishy footing in stadium (or dressage, I guess) isn’t all that awful. 4 cm isn’t even that deep of an impact crater.

Cross country is where things get sketchy.

Cross country footing is nowhere near as squishy as stadium footing, so I’m conservatively estimating a 1 cm vertical stopping distance. This drastically increases the vertical forces right off the bat.

vertical forces = 241.2 cm / 1 cm = 241.2 gs

If our spherical rider falls off of her horse traveling at 400 mpm, and stops in a distance of 10cm (skidding), then

Helmet compression of 2mm decreases this impact force to 395 gs, which is a really appreciable decrease. As if I needed more reason to wear a helmet — gotta protect that money maker.

These estimates are probably not all that realistic, given the many caveats I had to list above. I’m also not taking into account multiple concussions, bouncing, being kicked by horses, hitting other objects… Really, there’s a lot more that could go in to this model to make it more accurate (though as we know, the more predictors you add to a model the less predictive it actually becomes — statistics is a cruel mistress). But it was an interesting exercise in practicing physics and geometry again, and gave me some idea of the serious forces we put our heads under. Thank you, helmet, for protecting my melon so often!

(Now I have other questions. What forces are needed to break certain bones, for example?!)

Whenever discussions of helmet safety pop up, there’s always that one person out there who is like “well, helmets make you feel more safe and therefore more willing to do dangerous things so ultimately it’s less safe to wear one overall!” And I always was like

uh-huh…

Then I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, Freakonomics, and their very first episode addressed a paradox where the incentives to perform a behavior make it such that this behavior is performed to a level where the incentives no longer exist. In sporting parlance, adding equipment to make riding (or football or NASCAR or add in your sport of choice here) safer make it such that people do this sport or activity to such a level (bigger, faster, stronger, more dangerouser) that the incentives no longer exist. So apparently those helmet wearing naysayers were right.

Ugh fine

So there does, in fact, exist a safety paradox. And if you look at the statistics (I’m not going to repeat them here because it is late and I don’t want to go and get them from the twinternet), the number of serious injuries in sports like football have increased an insane amount as protective equipment has increased. I suspect that in sports like hockey and other full-contact sports (forgive me for not knowing more, I don’t really follow… other sports) the number of serious injuries have increased as safety equipment has been added also. I am not sure this statistic holds true for things like NASCAR (do you capitalise that whole word? I don’t even know), when things like fire-resistant suits and cages that keep the driver safe during rolls have made the sport overall safer, however I definitely think that there are probably much more spectacular crashes than in the past.

Gettin’ some

When I thought deeply about the safety paradox and how it might apply to my life, there are definitely things I will not do without my safety equipment. I will not ride my horse without a helmet on. I will not go out on XC and jump the jumps without a vest and helmet. Now, for the sake of this argument, I will admit that I would could probably jump my horse around a course even up to 3′ without incurring a traumatic brain injury. Also, I could probably jump around a BN cross country course without having my torso crushed by my horse. However, and this ties in below, the things I am protecting myself against are not the everyday injuries and casualties of my sport (as in football, where people habitually smash their bodies against other bodies and the ground). I am protecting myself against the horrible freak accidents that are, sadly, all too common in our sport.

And this ties in to why I don’t think the safety paradox exists as strongly in equine sports than in others.

First, in no equine sport is the human or equine body use as an offensive weapon.

Second, in no equine sport have advancements in equine safety been made such that horse injury or death can be prevented by a single piece of equipment.

Even happy XC corgis wear a helmet!

To expound upon my first point, neither my body nor my horses body is used as an offensive device against another horse, human, or obstacle. The goal of my sport, and most equine sports, is to avoid bashing down the various obstacles that we are presented with. So… no aspect of the safety elements that we wear make it such that hitting an obstacle is more alluring.

Second, there’s a whole other creature in the equation here! It’s not just about my safety but also my horse’s safety. No piece of safety equipment for myself or my horse makes it such that an injury to my horse could be prevented by wearing them. Tendon boots? Breakable. Air vest? Doesn’t help a horse. Helmet? My horse don’t wear one.

But maybe he should! I could see Murray rocking this with a little sparkle and rhinestone action!

So what does this mean in terms of the safety paradox? Well… I would think it defies it. There aren’t safety incentives available that make riding so safe for the horse that riding dangerously should be more common. At least not in my opinion.

Of course, on the other side of this argument, it’s quite possible that safety equipment empowers people to do stupid things they wouldn’t otherwise do with their horses. Jumping bigger than they or their horse are capable of. Galloping in an unsafe position or out of control. Unbalanced sliding stops (I don’t know I’m searching for an example here). Maybe that is the whole point of this paradox, but “stupid” is the key word for me here. However, in all of these cases I posit that a person could be killed or seriously injured even with their safety equipment. There ain’t no* cure for stupid.

Just throwing this in here for good measure.

* Double negative intentional, because there is a cure for stupid. But only one.